Mortal love

I have seen the video now, of course. And the speculation that comes with it.

It's an evil thing, the speculation. You can't stop it, and you never request it, and yet like most speculation it is the enemy of fact. It is just guesswork, and guesswork lives next door to rumor, and rumor is a magic trick, a wisp of smoke that is somehow both weightless and maliciously weighty.

But I can't watch the video -- shot by the man himself -- of Antonio Brown repeatedly shouting at police officers to "get the (bleep) out of here," and not think this is just the latest episode in a man's sad public unraveling. And then to think if this is what the early stages of CTE looks like, if his unraveling is the price he's paying for loving football too much.

We've seen that price exacted too many times by now, and it is cruel and it is merciless and it is not something anyone can do very much about. The pashas who run football and makes billions off it have tied their rulebooks in knots trying, and yet Dave Duerson and Junior Seau and Andre Waters keep stepping off this world just to stop the pain.

Men in their 40s and 50s, or even younger, continue to forget where they live, forget their loved ones, forget their own names. They explode in rages that come out of nowhere and against which they are helpless. They climb in their cars and go careening down the wrong side of the freeway until a head-on collision ends their lives -- and stops the pain -- in a firestorm of shrieking metal and blossoming flame.

Football doesn't always do this. It doesn't always present this sort of terrible bill for loving it. But it does so often enough.

And so there is perhaps a direct thread that runs between Antonio Brown raving at police from his front step, and what Carolina Panthers' star Luke Kuechly did this week.

What Luke Kuechly did was, he walked away from a successful and lucrative NFL career.

Luke Kuechly is 28 years old.

Thus he became the latest NFL player to hang it up before his 30th birthday, on the notion that the game isn't worth the price it exacts, or possibly could exact. Kuechly suffered seven concussions, and maybe more, just between 2015 and 2017. A couple more, he figures, and his brain is squash. It may be already.

In any event, he's getting out. As Andrew Luck got out. As Chris Borland and Jason Worilds and Patrick Willis, beaten up physically or burned out emotionally, got out. As many more will get out going forward, because as easy as football is to love, it's not worth becoming the next Dave Duerson or Junior Seau or Justin Strzelczyk -- the former Pittsburgh Steeler who met his end on the wrong side of that aforementioned freeway.

It's not worth, perhaps, becoming the next Antonio Brown, who blew up his career as the NFL's top receiver in a series of increasingly unhinged episodes, the latest of which you can find on that video.

Again, I don't know if football has anything to do with that. Again, that is mere evil speculation. But you are helpless not to wonder.

As Luke Kuechly no doubt wondered this week, about those seven (or more) concussions. And acted accordingly.